Humbert demands chiptunes!

Today, while writing, Cicada's wonderful Technology Crisis album shuffled up in iTunes and Humbert J. Humbird*, my usually stoic budgerigar, went absolutely bazonkers.

Stopping dead in the middle of a dignified preen of his magnificent array of rectal plumage, Humbert let out one questioning twirple?, as if he couldn't quite believe that his tiny little ear holes had finally become attuned to the music of the spheres. Then he spent the next twenty minutes singing and dive bombing around the room, pausing only occasionally during song breaks to light upon my head and attempt to rip my glasses off.

Finally, he exhausted himself, and attempted to refresh himself by eating a piece of millet that was to his tiny emerald body the proportionate size of a twenty foot long ear of corn. Yet even as he ate, Humbert could never stop twittering along to the rhythm of Cicada's funky chiptune grooves; consequently, he sprayed millet everywhere.

But Humbert's spastically gauche manner of eating while stimulated is neither here nor there, although it is certainly nice to finally deflate some of his regal pomp. My point: Humbert loves chiptunes. When the music was over, he fell into a black humor, climbing sullenly back in his cage, jumping upon his swing and chewing a bell with the gravity of a Byronic poet in a fugue.

I would have put on more chiptune music to please him. Yet outside of Cicada and a few video game soundtracks, I don't have much. Does anyone have any recommendations for excellent chiptunes suitable for the refined aural discernment of a renaissance parakeet? Or even for my own enjoyment? Although keep in mind, it is less important that I like your recommendations than the tiny feathered dinosaur sitting on my shoulder, a master of the disapproving stink-eye:

Cicada is actually called Tettix now! He’s super rad and has a ton of stuff on his site for download. http://tettix.net He even made us a custom theme song for the Weekly Geek podcast. For seriously. http://weeklygeekshow.com

Also SLAY Radio can be a good source (and you can make requests from the robot when no live show is on); if Kohina is still on the air an even better bet. NectarineDemoscene if it still exists also. All three have feeds you can listen to in iTunes.

Also Makke’s album It’s Binary, Baby! can be fun (you can buy that any many other lovely such things at c64.org).

But really…just check out scene.org and when c64.org is back up check it out too. Lots of free good stuff.

For more mainstream bands that have built on 8-bit’s foundation, there’s my favorite band of all time, Crystal Castles and Kap Bambino. They’re both electroclash, usually very lo-fi but not necessarily 8-bit meets noise. It’s gloriously fevered destruction.

Crunchy Records had a few guys — Fighter X and Circles in particular, but there were a couple other guys I haven’t identified as well — playing out in front of the Penny Arcade Expo this year. Playing on hacked and circuit-bent Gameboys. It was pretty awesome.

It looks like my last post never made it through. I recommended Copy, Slagsmalklubben, pocketmaster, and the electroclash derivative bands like Crystal Castles and Kap Bambino. I’d link everything again but it took me a lot of time last time and I’d rather not again.

Crystal Castles is hardly overhyped, hohum. Any hype they’ve had, they deserve. Regardless of what they’ve been accused of (most of which has been spiteful crowd noise), they are an amazing band. Alice’s lyrics and Ethan’s ability surpass most of what’s been done for 8-bit.

A friend told me that parakeets have vocal systems that can only produce a couple of waveforms at once, so it could be that the waveform simplicity of chiptunes is exactly what the budgie ear has evolved to respond to.

This would also explain why my bird tends to like electric guitar.

As far as chiptune recommendations: bitshifter.

We got our bird an album of ambient sound recordings from the Australian outback. “Spirit of the Outback”, it’s on iTMS and eMusic. The bit he finds most interesting isn’t the recording of wild budgies, it’s the black-tailed cockatoos–I think he feels compelled to compete and squawk them down.

Stopping dead in the middle of a dignified preen of his magnificent array of rectal plumage, Humbert let out one questioning twirple?, as if he couldn’t quite believe that his tiny little ear holes had finally become attuned to the music of the spheres.

Wow. That line deserves to be etched into a marble slab ten feet tall.